BAGHDAD, June 4 — They started college just before or after the American invasion with dreams of new friends and parties, brilliant teachers and advanced degrees that would lead to stellar jobs, marriage and children. Success seemed well within their grasp.
Ali Yussef/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images
On May 13, students walked around large barriers of concrete placed around Mustansiriya University to protect against car bomb attacks. The university has been the target of a number of such attacks.
Kareem Raheem/Reuters
Men carried a student at the economics and administration college of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad who had been wounded in a suicide bomb attack in February.
Four years later, Iraq's college graduates are ending their studies shattered and eager to leave the country. In interviews with more than 30 students from seven universities, all but four said they hoped to flee immediately after receiving their degrees. Many said they did not expect Iraq to stabilize for at least a decade.
"I used to dream about getting a Ph.D., participating in international conferences, belonging to a team that discovered cures for diseases like AIDS, leaving my fingerprint on medicine," said Hasan Tariq Khaldoon, 24, a pharmacy student in Mosul, in the north. "Now all these dreams have evaporated."
Karar Alaa, 25, a medical student at Babil University, south of Baghdad, said, "Staying here is like committing suicide."
The class of 2007 came of age during a transformation that according to students has harvested tragedy from seeds of hope. They are the last remnants of a middle class that has already fled by the tens of thousands. As such they embody the country's progression from innocence to bitter wisdom amid dashed expectations and growing animosity toward the Americans.
They said would leave their country feeling betrayed, by the debilitating violence that has killed scores of professors and friends, by the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism and by the Americans, who they say cracked open their country, releasing spasms of violence without protecting the moderate institutions that could have been a bulwark against extremism.
"I want to tell them thanks for liberating us, but enough with the mistakes," said Abdul Hassein Ibrahim Zain Alabidin, a Shiite Turkmen studying law at Kirkuk University, in the north. The errors, he said, "led to division and terrorism."
Iraq's roughly 56,000 graduates began their college careers under far different circumstances. With the world's strongest power expected to democratize and modernize their country, they said, they felt special, chosen, about to be famous on the worldwide stage.
"I thought we would be like stars," said Ahmed Saleh Abdul Khader, 21, a biology student in the southern city of Basra.
"I was thinking that Iraq would be like Las Vegas, especially Kirkuk, which has oil," Mr. Alabidin said. Instead, after an initial period of hope after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government, the students said they watched in awe as Iraq's underlying sectarian and ethnic conflicts emerged and flourished.
At the country's 21 universities, the decline started with chaos. Looters stole ancient artifacts and destroyed buildings at Basra University, for instance, only days after British troops reached the area in 2003.
Violence followed. In June 2004, a geography professor at the University of Baghdad was killed after leaving the campus. He would not be the last.
"We've lost over 200 professors, being killed," said Abed Thiab al-Ajili, Iraq's minister of higher education. "A number of others have been kidnapped."
Scores more have fled, he said, leading the perpetually upbeat Mr. Ajili to spend much of his time trying to persuade those still here to stay. It is a particularly difficult task; in November, dozens of ministry employees were kidnapped in broad daylight by gunmen wearing police uniforms.
"I'm not going to say we are in a good position," Mr. Ajili said. "We are surviving. We are trying our best to have an educational system to be as good as we can."
Students said Iraq's university system had significantly declined, dragged down by chronically canceled lectures and decrepit equipment, all in an atmosphere of growing terror and violence.
Mr. Alabidin said his class of law students in Kirkuk had shrunk to just 30 at graduation, from 85 in 2003, because of the bloodshed and fear. He acknowledged that more Shiites were entering college than before. He was even one of the students who said he did not plan to leave, declaring that "I am no better than those who have suffered or been killed."
But he could not contain his frustration with the country his class would inherit. He said he and his friends constantly discussed "the ugliness of terrorism, the free-for-all of killing in Iraq, Americans' mistakes, the way they humiliate Iraqis, the shameful stance of neighboring countries and the loss of the Iraqi identity to divisions by sect and ethnicity."
"I blame Saddam because he sold Iraq and was behind the coming of the occupiers," Mr. Alabidin said. "I blame the American administration for its mistakes in dealing with Iraqis."
